Reflections on American Vs. European Education

At the Solvay Institute, an undergraduate business school in Brussels, he spends 34 hours a week in class - 11 courses in advanced math, physics, chemistry, economics, business, and leadership. If he fails one, he has to repeat the year.

Contrast that to the 15 hours I spend in class every week and you understand why he teases me about college in America.

I lived in Belgium my whole life until coming to Maryland for college, and the only thing I ever heard about higher ed is that it was a back-breaking test you had to go through before you were allowed to work. "It's four years of sacrifice," my teachers told me.

In high school, I had 39 class hours a week: Latin, Greek, Calculus, Geography, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Philosophy, English, French, Flemish, History - you name it, I studied it. "L'Universit," I was told, was more of the same, just harder. Well, I never gave myself the chance to find out. When I graduated from high school, I grabbed a plane to Maryland and enrolled at Mount Saint Mary's. During my first year here, I worried that I had taken the easy way out. My paltry five classes a semester seemed so pathetic at first - the reading was easy, the tests were a breeze. Harder is better, I reasoned.

If more than 30 percent of Belgian college students flunk out their first year, it must be a great system, challenging and demanding. I thought I was wasting my precious intellectual ability. Well, I just didn't get it. Education is not just about learning facts, it's also about how you transform that knowledge into real skills. That's what's great about the American liberal-arts system - it transforms the depth and richness of academic study into an understanding of the complexities of everyday life.

A good education respects the textbook while at the same time going beyond it. The liberal-arts system recognizes that knowledge is a complex puzzle whose pieces include books, encyclopedias, newspapers, the Internet, and classroom debate. The student is challenged to put that puzzle together, instead of being force-fed knowledge that has already been assembled.

Nicolas has written four papers in the three years he's been at Solvay. But he has memorized four-dozen textbooks in preparation for strenuous make-or-break exams, each of which covers an entire semester of work. He does fine under the rigorous European system. But I know too many hard-working students whose academic careers have been wrecked by such elitist curriculums.

Unfortunately, in Belgium, phys-ed is comparable to med school. Maxime flunked physics, one of 11 courses required for freshmen. He could have repeated his entire year, but his enthusiasm had run dry and his self-confidence was shattered. He quit school to go work for his dad's plumbing business. He tried hard - he just wasn't an intellectual.

I'm not advocating a touchy-feely "less is more" education philosophy. My point is that, ultimately, the best education is one that enables students to build skills they will need in real life.

- John Miller

* John Miller, a junior studying international studies at Mount Saint Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Md., plans to pursue a career in international journalism.